EDITORIAL: Welcome to the forty third edition of you weekly #histSTM links list Whewell’s Gazette bringing you all that we could find about the histories of science, technology and medicine presented in the Internet during the last seven days. As I type outside my window the reviving spring sun is shining in a blue sky tempting the green shoots and blossoms out of the trees and bushes bring an end to the long grey winter. Two hundred years ago nature demonstrated to the human race what can happen when spring doesn’t come and the cycle of growth is interrupted by an unexpected occurrence. On 10 April 1815 the volcano Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa ejecting vast quantities of dust and ash into the atmosphere causing massive interruptions in the weather patterns of the whole world. The year 1816 became known at the year without summer and led to the worst famine in the nineteenth century causing the deaths of tens of thousands throughout the world. Since the beginning of the modern period humanity has lived with the dream, or should that be the illusion, that science will give us total dominion over world and all that it contains. So-called natural disasters such as the Tambora demonstrate to us just how fragile our grip on our lump of rock hurtling through space really is.

Aerial view of the caldera of Mount Tambora, formed during the colossal 1815 eruption.Source: Wikimedia Commons

“Nature is like an oracle that points to one of various alternatives we suggest rather than answering us directly in a language of its own”. – @cratylus

“I would rather be a meteor every atom in me in magnificent glow than a sleepy permanent planet” – Jack London

“To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say”. – Descartes

“When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice.” – Bismarck h/t @jondresner

“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking”. – J. W. v. Goethe

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of Ockham

“Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent students do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds” – Dianne Ravitch “Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come… Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate…” – Seneca

“On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the Big Bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation” – Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) Proponent of the “steady-state” universe. Coined the term “Big Bang” while at the same time rejecting it on BBC radio (1949). h/t @hist_astro